I was going to write an article on improving the curation rewards, following yesterday's post about my curation experience, but I think I'll just post this here instead.

This is indeed a great idea - I was thinking along these lines anyway, having a "Curator's Reputation". Your Account Rank implementation sounds good to me. Will the ranks be influenced by the Steem Power of the voters? I.e. If I get 30 votes from whales versus 30 votes from minnows, will be Account Rank be 1000x more? I understand that this will distribute influence away from the whales, but my question is, to what magnitude?

An issue that remains to be addressed is great content from new / unknown authors and most importantly, niche subjects. This Account Rank system further undermines that. I spend a lot of time curating, and I upvote many gems which are often far more eloquent and engaging than most posts on the Trending page. Over time I have noticed this is usually from new authors and niche subjects. I don't even mean niche, really - common topics like science or gaming. If the community has to grow, there must be a large diversity of topics. This is what Reddit does so well - there's a sub for everything!

I don't know how this could be accomplished, but one way would be offering lesser curation rewards for tags and authors that are popular. Today, it's easy to see which posts are Trending material. Posts from known authors about Steemit are pretty much guaranteed to be on the Trending page. As @condra pointed out, people vote for them to cash in curation rewards. The post may well be good content - but they are often over-inflated. I don't think these deserve much in the way of curation rewards.

I would even go one step further and penalize author rewards for these trending tags. We see people make posts about Steemit simply because that's the most popular, rather than subjects they truly believe in. The platform is foregoing diversity.

Today, the Reddit user who partakes in the r/gaming sub is going to come to Steemit and find no content whatsoever. In the long term, it would be r/jujitsu or r/NASA. Steemit NEEDS diversity to thrive.

Just some thoughts there to consider.